Laws versus Jones

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Name-calling knows no bounds
in the vendetta between two
former friends, writes Miranda Devine.

There has always been a nasty streak in Sydney, a more vicious, ad hominem flavour to disagreements than you'd find in other Australian cities or, for that matter, other big cities like New York and London. The cattiness is often reflected in the media in ways unthought of in more civilised places.

A friend transplanted here from Melbourne describes Sydney as being "like one of those small country towns where the backyard gossips run the show".

Ancient vendettas are part of the package, and none better epitomises Sydney venom than the feud between the radio announcers Alan Jones and John Laws. Mix in two conservative bogymen, the Australian Broadcasting Authority chairman, David Flint, and the Prime Minister, John Howard, as the ABC's Media Watch did last month, and bile explodes from every pundit in town.

The story began when Media Watch's David Marr went into overdrive on his favourite obsession, Jones, devoting the bulk of four successive shows to the 2GB presenter. Media Watch uncovered a glowing 1999 letter written by "the suave Professor David Flint" to Jones before the infamous cash-for-comment inquiry. Then Laws claimed on his 2UE program that Jones told him at a dinner party four years ago that he, Jones, had instructed the PM to reappoint Flint as ABA chairman. The implication was that Flint had gone easy on Jones over cash-for-comment because he was in bed with Jones and Howard, all cultural soulmates conducting a right-wing conspiracy, or, as Laws called it "an unpleasant little troika".

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Suddenly Laws, the reviled right-wing shock jock whose deal with the banks launched the cash-for-comment scandal in the first place, had the rapt attention of the "refined" media. Now he was "Mr Laws" to the ABC's PM program and The 7.30 Report, a "commercial broadcaster" whose word was not to be doubted.

Flint, 65, is used to being called "preening and pompous", pretentious, a prig, and worse, mocked for his clipped accent and immaculate suits. Jones, too, would have to be impervious to the insults and innuendo, which range from "the Parrot" to "drama queen", "Gloria" (after the theme song to his show) and far worse.

But Laws, with the help of his new unlikely friend and 2UE stablemate, Mike Carlton, took up the cudgels with extraordinary viciousness, even by Sydney standards, against his old colleague Jones, who had taken much of 2UE's audience and staff when he defected to John Singleton's 2GB in 2001.

For the past fortnight there have been ever-nastier undertones to the anti-Jones/Flint crusade. Laws took to calling Jones "a vicious old tart" on air and Flint the "effete, pretentious, posturing professor", "puerile, simpering, pusillanimous".

His coup de grace was this: "I was always told by my mother, 'Truth will out.' Well, if you are happening to be listening to me, old girl, up there, I can assure you before this is over it's going to be more than truth that is going to be outed ..."

But it wasn't until Laws appeared on Andrew Denton's ABC TV show Enough Rope last week that the full extent of the nastiness was revealed. Denton kept prodding Laws to explain what he meant when he said "more than truth ... is going to be outed". It was an extraordinary performance by Laws that should have shamed his supporters.

Laws, snickering, said Jones and Flint were "both little men. Both like matching ties and handkerchiefs. They both like Her Majesty the Queen ... Well, I suppose ultimately it'll be revealed that there is a reason that a couple wanted to stay in the closet."

Laws then retold a story first printed by Richard Ackland in these pages, claiming Flint had waited in a closet in a Bathurst motel room where the ABA was holding a hearing, so that he could make a grand entrance when he was called. (In fact, Flint said yesterday, he and another ABA member had simply waited in an adjoining room, not a cupboard, until the inquiry began.)

Despite the schoolyard bully attacks, Flint has never responded in kind. "It doesn't really affect me," he said yesterday, "because I expect it. My mother used to say: 'If you want to hurt somebody you can always find a stick.' Once you have a target you can always build up a case. And I can see I'm a delicious target because I am a conservative and can be easily cast to fit the bill of effete, posturing, pompous."

Flint suffered a similar kind of vilification in his youth, as a student at Sydney High, the son of a blond Tasmanian father and a beautiful Indonesian mother whose family arrived in Blacktown in 1917. It wasn't his accent or friendships that caused the bullying then but his mixed race.

"I had black hair and a round face in a school full of blond boys. I had a more Asian appearance then and I would be called 'Chink' and so on ... Now it seems absolutely ridiculous."

The refined accent, for which he is so hated, is the product of elocution lessons his mother sent him to so that he wouldn't speak English with a Dutch accent as her family did.

Perhaps Laws was cranky last week because he was aware his sliding ratings were now in freefall, as revealed by Tuesday's Nielsen radio survey in which he registered 7.3 percentage points, more than four points less than his 2GB counterpart and former understudy, Ray Hadley. It was reportedly the worst result in Laws's 34 years of Sydney morning radio and with the once-mighty 2UE now languishing in eighth place in the ratings charts, it is unlikely to recover.

Perhaps, too, the dismal result for 2UE reflected a massive audience turn-off in the final week of the survey when the viciousness against Jones hit new lows. A similar backlash factor always bolsters John Howard's support in the electorate, when his critics overstep the bounds of decency and logic. No one likes a bully.

In any case, Laws's performance on Enough Rope has eternally shamed him. By the end of the interview Denton had filleted Laws so expertly he hadn't a clue what had happened.

"Thank you for disgracing us with your presence," Denton said at the end.